At Australia’s longest construction site digital rail corridor datasets are making a real impact on project planning and efficiency. Starting in Victoria, Agonics assisted McConnell Dowell on the Inland Rail North-East Line Upgrade, which extends from Melbourne to just south of the NSW border and aims to achieve vertical clearance for double-stack container trains. Designing in this busy corridor posed challenges in obtaining comprehensive survey data especially for changes in and around bridges, level crossings, and existing overhead powerlines.

Using rail corridor MLS data, the Agonics team extracted track features and performed powerline and signal clearance investigations. The XERRA® LiDAR platform was configured to generate track feature outputs including railhead strings and reference datasets for ballast top and toe, earthworks, and other features. XERRA® also detected the lowest conductors on existing powerlines and calculated conductor clearances. Signal offset and clearance measurements were also generated.

For more information on the project please visit  McConnell Dowell Inland Rail

For Martinus, Agonics performed complex clearance assessments on new and existing tracks on the Inland Rail Albury-Parkes (A2P) corridor.

As the project is on an operational corridor, Martinus needed to demonstrate construction completion and clearance compliance following each section of track upgrade to confirm that double stacked freight trains could operate on the network.

Using existing and then new MLS datasets recorded during different phases of the project the XERRA® platform was configured to recognise adjacent rail track gauge points to support Kinematic Envelope (KE) to KE minimum airgap assessments through complex track arrangements and with correct curvature and cant parameters.

For more information on the project please visit  Martinus Inland Rail

For Inland Rail on the Beveridge to Albury (B2A) corridor Agonics supported the project team with an MLS survey and processing of imagery and LiDAR datasets into XERRA® in order to support comprehensive clearance analysis. The B2A Clearance Assessments were completed by experienced surveyors at Agonics with each type of investigation (track structure gauge, tracks KE-KE, turnout swept path, and track centre separations) completed according to Inland Rail prioritisation. These assessments also tested the proximity of V/Line broad gauge tracks where they are adjacent to the ARTC standard gauge tracks.

All these projects demonstrate the immense value that mobile LiDAR data coupled with specialist railway visualisation and analytics software can bring to large railway construction projects such as Inland Rail and we look forward to new and challenging use cases as this incredible project progresses.